age of piracy;

[chuffle]

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[chuffle]

[After she pulled Charles from the gallows - well, it wasn't that simple, but if she's asked that's how she'll describe it - and brought him home, to India, to the tiny nation (and it is, tiny) that she rules, wedged between the jungle and the mountains and the sea, she had to spend too much time convincing her family that it was going to be okay.

It helped that Charles was a feral thing, too, that he wasn't afraid of her cousins or her grandmother or afraid of bringing up the fact that Daphne herself, their queen by blood and right and strength, was as much a foreigner with her Spanish and Native mother as she was them. It helped more that he understood their issues: they needed money, and strength, and power, to keep the Portuguese and the English and the Mughals from trying to take their small, prosperous little area.

The fact that he didn't mind - or that he respected - that they were a complicated network of shifters and kin and people who washed up from the sea helped. Piracy was always in demand, he found, and captaincy and the ocean was in his blood.

So Daphne knew that months at sea were part of the deal. That actually was the deal: she could continue to rule the land, but the sea was his domain, and she ceded to his will there. It was a good system, because it kept her family happy, and it kept the men he brought with him happy, and the shifters who wanted to go to sea could understand it. On the ship, they lived and died by his will. On the ocean, they were his.

On land, it was the opposite.

But the second that one of the little boys came running to announce that the ship had been spotted, Daphne was already making her way down to the beach, her hair bound up, wearing the kind of blue silk she knows that he thinks shows off wealth and power. More than that, it was obvious against the white of the beach and the green of the jungle behind her.

She doesn't pace as she watches the men unload. Instead one of the boats comes onshore and she watches them pull chest after chest of luxury onto the beach, and she gets on to row back out.

His terrain. His kingdom. The men are still very careful, because she's his woman, and because she could slice the balls off any of them and no one would blink an eyelid, as they haul her up, so she's sitting on the edge of the ship itself, her legs dangling in her skirts towards the sea.]

What pretty thing did you bring me?

[She always asks that first, and when she sees him striding up the deck, she asks that even though what she wants is to kiss him, to pull him into her arms and hold him there, tightly, without saying a word.]

[chuffle]

[In another couple of days, the bullet wounds are healed completely; the color has returned to her skin, and she's been thoroughly pampered by both Charles and her family. The wound on her shoulder is almost healed too, just the line of it marring her tattoo, which she's already whined about having to get touched up.

She's been doing work in bed, when Charles comes back from wherever he went - to talk to his men, to erect a border of hunters heads, to get drunk, she doesn't know because when he left she was already writing letters with her good arm and was barely distracted by his goodbye kiss.

Now he's back, and he's stalking in like he has a plan. She barely looks up when she's suddenly in his arms, yelping a bit.]

Well hello to you too, lion.

[She moves her healing arm to grip his shirt; she's fully aware she hasn't been bathed since she came back from the jungle.]

Nassau;

[chuffle]

[She watched it all, from just outside of reach.

When she says it all, she means the disaster of what happened to the Ranger. Watched the way that one minute they had power and prestige and value, and the next minute Jack Rackham lost a bag of pearls more valuable than he should have even had on his person, watched Charles dissolve into distilled emotion and opium. Watched him fuck his whores and watched him fuck Eleanor, too.

They could have been something, Charles and Eleanor. Daphne knows it. She’s still the strange savage woman that the Ranger brought back from a ship almost six months ago, who came dripping in jewels, who almost killed a man who tried to take her by force, and certainly bit a chunk of his dick off.

But she would like to think that she’s Charles’ friend, too. Maybe. She likes him, his savageness. She learned English next to him, his patience in translating to her in his sleek Spanish. He helped her establish herself - a woman who is not a whore and not a merchant, but who does valuable odd things. Her skills in determining the value of items, a proper appraisal of luxury, he helped her leverage it.

So when the Ranger goes belly up - well, no. When the crew does what crews do and abandon Charles for Eleanor’s threats, she watches, dark eyed and considering. She watches as Jack takes over the whorehouse, and then one day Charles is gone and Daphne can’t help but wonder-

-well.

She’s at the whorehouse when he comes back, not to peruse but to appraise a very badly forged gold bracelet some enterprising criminal gave one of the girls, and watches him withdraw his blessing from Jack Rackham.

There he is.

That’s the man she knew, the one who had lain eyes on her when she was a feral, raving thing. The one who she wants, even though she can hear her grandmother’s voice in her head. That man is not for you. That man belongs to another woman.

Eleanor doesn’t want him.

He still want Eleanor, she thinks. Still.

She slips out of the brothel; it’s been weeks since she saw him, but around here that doesn’t always mean much. She’s taken to dressing like the local women, which is infuriating - there are too many layers. She misses her cool choli and gaghra.

She’s stopped by one of his new men as she comes by.]

Do I look like an assassin?

[She rolls her eyes.]

Charles!